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Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164
- ronsor 9mo agoUnfortunately for Spotify, court orders are ineffective against foreign nationals sharing information. Copyright enforcement is as futile as the encryption "export restrictions" the US and other countries tried in the 90s and early 2000s.
- snowmobile 9mo agoSince they don't "own" the data they lost, only "rent" it, they probably have to be seen doing something about it, lest they face the wrath of record companies.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoI have a really hard time imagining the record companies giving a shit about this, this isn't a pre-release leak. All the valuable content is already freely and easily available for download on the internet.
- Nextgrid 9mo agoIt's performance art all the way down - it repeatedly states they are not happy about piracy and will come after anyone doing it. This isn't aimed at pirates as much as it's aimed at non-pirates, especially companies with significant assets. They know full well pirates don't care, but it's a message to any company or entity seen as "too friendly" with pirates or that enables pirates to do their thing.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoI doubt anyone in the industry really cares at this point, and in the end it's a rather small group of massive companies whose opinions Spotify cares about.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoThe PR of being "hard on pirates" matters a lot more than any losses they may take, imagined or otherwise. I just hate how fast courts will act on this compared to matters of literal life and death.
- cryzinger 9mo agoYeah, but TFA notes how Anna's Archive is dependent on US-based infrastructure, including Cloudflare. As much as I love Anna's Archive, I feel like this Spotify move was a misstep on their part. The music industry seems far scarier than the publishing industry when it comes to copyright suits, which means they have a lot to lose here by poking the bear, but there are already plenty of places to find pirated music, which means they also don't have much to gain.
- snowmobile 9mo agoIt's a cool publicity stunt for Anna's, and perhaps the hackers responsible for getting the data simply wanted to show it off and leave Spotify with some egg on their face. I know I wouldn't be able to stop myself from publishing it if I was in their position, foolish as it may be.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- selfhoster11 9mo agoI disagree. Music needs to be archived just as much as books and other publications. Yes, there is heat, but lots of people support them.
- endofreach 9mo agowhat‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library. m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.
- whywhywhywhy 9mo ago>what‘s in it for spotify? Their relationship with the labels
- snowmobile 9mo agoMany people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.
- ulrashida 9mo agoExactly this. Increasing prices with worsening service and feature bloat combined with questionable ethics made it an easy decision to cancel.
- parpfish 9mo agoThis is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for. They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day
- writebetterc 9mo ago> This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. The pie that Spotify divides up among the artists is a global one. It's not like you listen to one artist, so they get your 10 bucks every month. You're paying Taylor Swift, even though you never listen to her.
- dang 9mo agoRecent and related. Others? Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164 - Jan 2026 (358 comments) Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355793 - Dec 2025 (82 comments) Backing up Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 - Dec 2025 (701 comments)
- amatecha 9mo agoIMO also recent and related: NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628 - Jan 2026 (153 comments)
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoPretty much where we are in the world. You can scrape copyrighted works and re-jigger them in your own database to spit out a fascimile of art. But you can't "point" to where these scapers are going.
- akersten 9mo agoBut you can't even download the allegedly infringing material from the .org site. You can just read about it? So they're abusing the All Writs Act to take down a site that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for their business. If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.
- cyanydeez 9mo agounless you have a billion dollars, not sure anyone cares what side you're on. Voting with your wallet no longer really matters does it unless your wallet is attached to a billion dollar stock portfolio.
- crazygringo 9mo ago> that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad thing. Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was "undetermined" or "nebulous". Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that. I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here.
- Supermancho 9mo ago> Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that. You can get more "clear cut" than that. You could rule when there were damages or law was actually broken. Committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. ie. I will rob the bank on the Chase Bank Kraemer Branch in Orange County. Now try and prosecute me. Yes, I understand this would fall under criminal vs civil. The issue is about the law being applied in the way the benefits the ones with the most money, more often than not, violating equal protections and further eroding public confidence in the US legal system.
- franze 9mo agoDeezer has in its onboarding flow a pretty cool "get your lists from spotify" feature. from all liked/currated songs - a few thousands - it could not match about 2.
- DyslexicAtheist 9mo agocould you expand on this please? if I understood correctly then Deezer fails to match songs from a list of thousands? thanks
- xvokcarts 9mo agoI understood it as out of a few thousand songs, Deezer only failed to match 2.
- walthamstow 9mo agoYou can also download FLAC or 320k MP3 from Deezer with deemix.
- hollow-moe 9mo agoTried moving there something like a year ago, the service didn't work at all, iirc the UI was awful and confusing and once I got around it, there was a lot of my tracks that couldn't be imported. I hate that Spotify is the one service I still can't part with, self-hosting nextcloud emails and such.
- xmonkee 9mo agoTechnical question: I run my own Pi hole dns server. Is it possible to just add an A record for it? What are you guys doing to get around this?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Banditoz 9mo agoWikipedia has a list of active domains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
- stock_toaster 9mo agoThere are some alternate domains listed on wikipedia [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
- globular-toast 9mo agoYes, you can. Can be done in the GUI of PiHole.
- cdrnsf 9mo agoPretty ironic considering they bootstrapped the service with pirated music. But they've never actually cared about music — they started as an ad platform and music was the cheapest option for them to attract eyeballs.
- holmesworcester 9mo ago"Spotify" literally means "put ads on things". It's not obvious to US English speakers but "spot" was ad industry jargon and became the word for "TV commercial" in several European languages. It's so gross that this ever slid through as a brand for a music app. We've descended so far...Music app branding started with Wesley Willis jokes!
- crazygringo 9mo agoThat's a fun theory but there's no evidence that was their intention with the name... From what they've said, it's about "spotting" and "identifying" music and music trends. But it seems like mostly it was just a somewhat nonsense word that was easy to remember and whose domain name was available. Especially since it's popular as a paid service without ads.
- bbor 9mo agoI love random folk etymologies, especially when they posit sinister conspiracies along the way -- thanks for the concise correction. Wikipedia confirms on both counts: According to Ek, the company's title was initially misheard from a name shouted by Lorentzon. Later they conceived a portmanteau of "spot" and "identify". It also kinda blows my mind how common it is to listen to a ton of Spotify without paying, NGL! It just seems like such an absurd value proposition to me, even now as it matures from its growth days. All music??
- hirako2000 9mo agoIn any case they have an agreement with copyright holders. Anna Archive does not. IP laws are broken, keep extending protection, and do not prevent distribution exclusivity. I could sell a license to Bob who can sell my arts to you. But I won't give a license to Alice to even be able to enjoy the art for the fee I charged Bob, and I can tell Bob to do the same and not give it away to Alice at any cost. The law would say that's fine, and let's even arrest Bob if he ever sells to Alice.
- themafia 9mo agoI don't understand the sealing and ex-parte motions in this case. It looks completely corrupt. They're claiming that the archive would have released all the material publicly if they were allowed to know an injunction was about to be filed against them. Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? I cannot understand how they hoodwinked a court into this misguided procedure.
- thenaturalist 9mo agoThe harm being done is millions of dollars for VCs and music studios. Billionaires and enterprises want to see consumers spending to return their investment. The presence of other - dispersed - illegal material doesn’t diminish said returns too much, this central dump would have set precedent and had garnered massive attention. This is the capitalist way.
- crazygringo 9mo ago> Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? There's a huge difference between a ton of individual torrents or files you need to individually search for, identify, of varying quality, that may be mislabeled and have other sorts of quality issues, and which in no way approach "all" music... ...vs a single, shockingly comprehensive repository of uniformly high-quality music which does, in fact, approach "all" music. If I wanted to start a pirate music service, it would become vastly easier with this particular repository. Many orders of magnitude easier. That's the actual harm.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoLossless pirate archives also still exist if you know where to look. Not saying you're wrong, but from a truly material angle, someone dedicated to finding an archive with enough music to start a pirate site need only join one of the existing lossless pirate sites and copy theirs. I don't see how Anna's making it easier negates the fact that it can already be done
- crumpled 9mo agoThe Wikipedia page for Anna's archive was a lot more helpful leading people to the goods than the .org domain was. Anna always knew the .org domain was vulnerable. Why wouldn't they?
- direwolf20 9mo agoEvery pirate site operator knows you don't use .org because the registry is very happy to take down pirate sites without much evidence. It's surprising this one lasted this long.
- seany 9mo agoWhy aren't they distributing things via i2p or something like it instead of clearnet?
- hermanzegerman 9mo agoThat's what I'm also always asking myself. Same thing with NexusSTC
- alessandroberna 9mo agoSeems that the Spotify torrents are now unavailable until further notice. bummer
- seized 9mo agoThe music one was never available but the metadata one can be found and still works.
- heraldgeezer 9mo agoFunny how .se is up
- Paracompact 9mo agoCan anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing. In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the open-source alternatives?
- miriam_catira 9mo agoI've heard good things about Tidal (https://tidal.com https://tidal.com) but it's not open source afaik.
- troupo 9mo ago> In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Because music is extremely hard to quantify. What do you quantify it on? See https://everynoise.com/ https://everynoise.com/ (the mess on the page is quantifying by just three or four out of 17 IIRC parameters) and their small doc on it: https://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf https://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf And doing that at scale across hundreds of millions of users quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. So companies simplify, and reach for simpler solutions, unfortunately.
- direwolf20 9mo agoThis is true for most things that have recommendation engines.
- chneu 9mo agoIt seems like they all do the loop eventually. I liked Tidal's recommendations. I went back to last.fm, music stores, friends recommendations, and music/TV scores(a lot of good movie sound folks are amazing musicians).
- lolive 9mo agoI still pay for Spotify, but nowadays 99% of my music consumption are local FM radios, plus mainstream webradios [radioParadise, FIP, BBC6, NTS]. I sometimes Shazam things, but rarely have the time to listen them back on Spotify. My attention time is limited by other things [:those stupid real-life stuff every normal person was praising in the old times: kids, family, work, burnout, failing cars, gardenning. And sleep!]
- zouhair 9mo agoAll in all Copyright did and is doing is more harm anything else.
- globular-toast 9mo agoCopyright was originally about protecting the public from corporations. An author had no incentive to write because a corporation with a printing press would mass produce the work for a fraction of the cost without paying the author. Copyright meant corporations couldn't do that. But since since at least the 90s copyright has been about protecting corporations from the public. This fits the general trend of the last 50 years or so. Corporations are amassing more and more power and the public has very little.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bni 9mo agoOnly Big Tech is allowed to pirate
- PeterStuer 9mo agoBig AI: "OK guys, did everybody get what they wanted? Get out, we're pulling up the drawbridge"
- saidnooneever 9mo agosharing knowledge for free is for the improvement of mankind. it fights the impoverishment of human intellect through control. sharing music and art for free... not so much. even if i put all my own music for free, yada yada. I do think there is a line and not everything should just be taken and put out for free. the benefit to human progress should outweigh that damage to the artists or owners of said material. i think we can all agree that most artists in that bundle are smalltime struggling artists. (the vast majority of something is never its peak afterall...). is it really so important to listen some artist for free to destroy the income of thousands upon thousands of others? i dont think it adds anything important in our lives.
- direwolf20 9mo agoArtists don't get meaningful revenue from streaming. Only distribution companies do.
- kmfrk 9mo agoI just tried to download a podcast series from Spotify today, and even this turned out to be a massive pain: no dice on gallery-dl, yt-dlp, and the browser doesn't have a dedicated download option, even when logged in. I was redirected to the Windows app to download an episode, and then I got denied from using the app because I was on a VPN with a different location than the one they had on file for me. Genuinely wonder how much podcast history we're going to lose, if we're just making walled gardens out of RSS feeds at this point. Hope someone does back up the Spotify-exclusive podcasts somewhere.